Fair Pay for Royal Cleaners - it's not much to ask

Yesterday I took some pictures at a demonstration outside Buckingham Palace, to support the PCS union's campaign for a London living wage for cleaners in the Royal Household.

The cleaners currently earn £6.45 per hour while the London living wage is £7.85.

Please sign the petition here.

More pictures here.

I will organise a republican picnic, but only if 3 or more households will get involved

I recently took a clever-clever dig at Barnet council for subverting Barnet PledgeBank into a tool to organise Royal Wedding parties, but I missed the actual story: Barnet council is subsiding people's Royal Wedding parties! That means I'm subsidising people's Royal Wedding parties!

Now, I realise that councils and their forerunners have since time immemorial paid for or subsidised royal celebrations of all sorts (apart from a sticky patch in the mid-17th century - they call it the English Revolution), but it still rankles. I know that loyalty to the monarchy is part of our constitution, and not, therefore, the same as a religious affiliation, but I still feel like appealing to "secular" principles here: I don't believe in monarchy, I don't want our constitutional monarchy, I don't see why I should contribute to Royal Wedding celebrations.

If people want street parties, let them arrange their own free public liability insurance. I realise that the council has to be involved with facilitating road closures: then let them charge for it! We're cash strapped, it could be a nice little earner.

I am going to submit a pledge to organise a republican picnic on the day. (Everyone round to my house!) Where's our free public liability insurance? Where are our traffic cones?

Assuming that my pledge is not successful, and you still want to go to an organised republican event on 29 April, the highly respectable Republic campaign are doing something in Earlham Street, Covent Garden. Details here.

I shall probably take myself and a few friends off for a picnic on Parliament Hill. I'm not going to do like some and migrate to France for the day. I don't know what happened on the cross-Channel ferry 30 years ago but it wasn't good.

Barnet PledgeBank: Kate and Wills to the rescue

So, you thought Barnet PledgeBank, which cost around £30k (some of us bloggers think), and which has been going since about Christmas yet has so far attracted only five pledges (that the council is prepared to publish - I know there have been others, and there is a FOI request in to find out how many pledge suggestions there have been in total).

You thought it was a big, fat waste of money. No, not a bit of it, you old cynic! The canny staff in Barnet council's unit for Engaging Citizens A Little Bit But Not Too Much (made-up name) - Anything Like Actual Enthusiasm or Critical Interest is to be Treated with Suspicion have found a use for Barnet PledgeBank after all.

Gosh, it's so apt you might almost think that the impending nuptials of Kate Middleton and William Windsor had been invented to save the blushes of whichever fools decided to hire MySociety at some considerable cost to produce a bespoke version just for Barnet of the usually free PledgeBank.

What is it, then, this turned cuff, this patched elbow, this darned sock of a social media site? I can reveal that Barnet PledgeBank will now be given over almost exclusively (probably), for the next couple of months, to providing a chance for Barnet residents to coordinate their royal wedding street party plans.

Frankly, don't you think that it would be easier for them just to go around and knock on a few doors, or lean across the garden fence, say?

Are people that afraid of speaking to each other these days, that they need to "find" each other through the medium of the Barnet council website? Oh, well, maybe. Never mind, read on...

The Royal Wedding of HRH Prince William and Kate Middleton will take place on 29 April this year. It’s a wonderful excuse for a street party — not only is a street party a fun way for residents to celebrate the event, it's also a great way to get to know your neighbours better.

Get involved!

Start or join a pledge to organise a street party in your road. Ideally, you'll need to get a minimum of 3 households involved. If you don't meet your target you don't have to act, but if you do then . . . party on!

Then it all gets a bit technical - bureaucratic even - with people having to fill in a royal wedding street party application form - if they want to close their street - and get some public liability insurance cover, etc.

Takes some of the romance out of it, doesn't it? No? Oh, OK.

Hurrah! A Royal Wedding! Hurrah! A new lease of life for Barnet PledgeBank! Hurrah! It's enough to make me into a royal-loving, social media-brain-addled Tory!

A better use for 62p, Or: A Royal wedding? That's all we f***ing need

What would you do with 62p? It's not a lot, is it, but off the top of my head, I could spend it on a small bottle of water - although what's wrong with water from the tap? This is probably not the best way to draw your attention to the fact that in 2009

The Queen and the Royal Family cost the taxpayer 62p per person - a drop of 7p...

I gleaned this information from a report in the Daily Telegraph. I don't know why the Royal Family costs us anything. It's not like they need 62p more than I do. I can only guess at how rich the Queen is, but I think with some judicious sales of assets and better investment advice she could probably plug the £7.9 million gap in funding which British taxpayers provide for the Civil List. In any case, do we agree that we need everything that is paid for from the Civil List? Wikipedia says it covers

some expenses associated with the Sovereign performing his or her state duties, including those for staffing, state visits, public engagements, ceremonial functions and the upkeep of the Royal Households.

And, besides the Civil List, the Royal Family get further money from the state:

The cost of transport and security for the Royal Family, together with property maintenance and other sundry expenses, are covered by separate grants from individual Government Departments.

With everything else I do, I don't have time to be a boned-up republican, but I shall certainly spend time this year paying more attention to this area of national life.

It's not the angle I would choose to moan about, but the Daily Telegraph today has a story about business worries that the Royal wedding on Friday 29 April will cost the country £6 billion in lost productivity, as workers enjoy extra holidays. Only £1 billion will be generated by additional tourism and sales of commemorative knick-knacks.

And then we have to go through the whole rigmarole again, to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, in 2012. David Cameron couldn't ask for a more timely gift.

I remember the Golden Jubilee in 2002. People made a great fuss of the Queen allowing pop stars to posture on the roof of Buckingham Palace and the projection of pictures onto the front of the building. The whole thing was really tacky and didn't cost her a thing, except in lost dignity - which mostly went years ago. In return, she and her brood get to live the life they love and play a murky constitutional role upholding the power of the super-rich in this country and around the world.

Oh, yes, and hold a cherished place in the hearts of most of the citizens of the UK and many further afield.

For years, naturally, I was one of those loyal subjects. The first thing I saw on television (the set belonged to a woman my mother cleaned for in Finchley) was the investiture of Prince Charles in 1969.

When they got married in 1973 I had a poster of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips on my bedroom wall.

In 1977 a friend and I celebrated the Queen's Silver Jubilee with a tea party for our toys.

In 1981, when Diana and Charles wed, I was on an archaeological dig in Gloucestershire run by republicans. My friends and I smuggled a radio in to listen to the wedding in secret. I was in London on the day in 1986 when Fergie and Andrew married and I actually waved at her carriage - shameful!

And, the thing I feel most ambivalent about, I was sad when Diana died in 1997, and went for a morose walk around Peckham Rye to share in the general mourning. (A dark period in my life in many respects.)

And now? I still feel that tug on my emotions; I still worry that there is something puritanical and miserabilist about thinking that I'd rather my 62p a year were spent on maintaining our public services. Or that the relationship of Wills and Kate ought to affect me not at all. Or that the Queen and her family should give up all their wealth in order to live like normal folk. They could donate it all to meeting some of the needs of the desperately poor around the world, like the people of Togo being treated by the Africa Mercy medical ship I saw on a television programme the other night.

It's shaping up to be a year for resisting those sort of sentimental pressures and cleaving to what you think is right.